This Explosive 1994 Footage of Maxine Waters Refusing To Be Silenced By Male Colleagues Will Blow Your Mind

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) delivers an impassioned rebuke of her male colleagues and their efforts to silence her on the floor of the United States House of Representatives on July 29, 1994. Courtesy of CSPAN.

Maxine Waters is a bad-ass.

Many Americans have come to know her as Auntie Maxine, the ferocious anti-Trump watchdog who doesn’t miss an opportunity to take a swipe at Donald Trump, who leads chants calling for his impeachment, who appears on cable news shows and refers to the president’s cabinet as the “Kremlin Klan.”

But given the success of the #MeToo and Women’s March movements, this rare footage from more than two decades ago of a defiant Maxine Waters fighting down the patriarchy seems alarmingly prescient. The rare, unearthed clip from a 1994 congressional hearing (decades before she infamously “reclaimed her time” in a 2017 one).

In this explosive clip, the verbal altercation between Waters and a (white male) colleague ends up with several men in the House chambers calling for the Sergeant at Arms to “bring her to her feet” and to physically remove her from the building.

Merely because she refused to be silent.

“Do you ever see men do this to other men?” Waters asks defiantly over a growing chorus of voices calling to adjourn the session before allowing her to speak, trying to intimidate her.

“The day is over when men can badger and intimidate women, marginalize them, and keep them from speaking. We are now in this House. We are members in this House. We will not allow men to intimidate us and to keep us from participating.”

The kerfuffle began a day prior when Waters came to the defense of a young woman named Maggie Williams who was testifying before the Budget Committee in its investigation into the Whitewater Scandal. After the chairman observed that Rep. Peter King (R-New York) had badgered Williams, Auntie Maxine threw herself into the lion’s den to defend her, courageously speaking over Mr. King to inform him repeatedly that he was “out of order,” or in violation of parliamentary rules.

Even as King laid into her by telling her that nobody cares about her, and to just “sit there and shut up,” Waters defiantly continues to repeat, “You are out of order.”